The Digging Leviathan (19 page)

“Ignatz,” said Pince Nez, “de Winter.”

“That’s the one!” Edward shouted, knowing nothing more
than he had a moment before. “What do you know about him?” The conversation seemed to Edward to be growing oddly circular.

“Carp don’t die,” said Pince Nez. “I know that much. Yes-sir.”

Edward nodded, baffled. Then, almost without meaning to, he leaned toward Captain Pince Nez and cried, “What do you make of Ashbless?”

Latzarel jerked up from his reading at the sound of the name. Pince Nez sat back in his chair and waved his hand tiredly, as if to say that he was fed up with the likes of Ashbless—that he’d had enough of him. Edward widened his eyes at Latzarel and made a similar tired gesture at Pince Nez to encourage him.

“The old poet?” asked the captain, smiling vaguely as if reminiscing about some event in the distant past.

Latzarel closed his book. Edward blinked back his surprise. Pince Nez shook his head. “I met him and Blanding out in Pedro,” he said, pronouncing the word with a long “e.” “Blanding was good, but Ashbless, he was old. Tired I guess. Crazy as a loon is what I think.”

“Blanding?” asked Latzarel into the captain’s ear trumpet.

“The other poet.” Pince Nez gave Latzarel an appraising look, then raised himself out of his chair in order to have a better look at his pipe table. Edward was afraid that Latzarel would insist that Pince Nez be given more money, but the crisis passed and the captain relaxed. He looked momentarily puzzled, then tapped against the brass cylinder again, slowly shutting his eyes.

Edward, supposing that the old man was falling asleep, shouted, “Hello!” then grinned immediately as Knee Nez lurched awake. He reached into his pocket and pulled out the three crumpled bills, licked his fingers, and counted through them twice.

“How much do you figure I owe you?” he asked Edward, who said immediately, “Forty ought to do it,” but was drowned out halfway through by Latzarel who yelled, “Nothing. Nothing at all! What about Ashbless? The poet?”

“Hired me to sail him to the Berdoo Straits.”

“To San Bernardino?” Edward asked.

“Pretty much.”

“When?” Latzarel gave Edward a look, nodding and pointing to the book, as if implying that within it lay an explanation
of the phenomenon of sailing to San Bernardino, which lay, of course, some fifty miles inland from the coast and utterly distant from any sizeable river.

Edward nodded at Pince Nez and shouted, “When?’

“Thirty-six,” said Pince Nez without hesitation. “Two years before the damned earthquake closed off the inland passage. Too damn bad, too.”

Edward nodded in commiseration. “That would have made you sixty-five or sixty-six.” Pince Nez squinted and counted the fingers of one hand laboriously, then left off and shrugged. “How old was Ashbless when you took him out to Berdoo?”

“Hard to say. He might’ve been a hundred. Easy that. Only I didn’t take him to Berdoo. Never got that far. I ferried him up toward Pasadena and some damn creature capsized us. I never seen the like. Ship went down. We both come out into the L. A. River and got drunk as lords off Los Feliz at a spot called Tommy’s Little Oasis. I remember that like yesterday.”

“Creature?” asked Latzarel.

Pince Nez stared at him.

“What creature?’

“Now I don’t know, do I?” said Pince Nez. “There was all sorts down there, wasn’t there?”

“Of course there were,” said Edward. “This was a big one though?”

The captain nodded. The telephone rang again, shooting Edward out of his chair like a comet. Pince Nez made no move to pick it up. Edward, finally, reached across and answered it. There was silence at the other end, perhaps breathing, then a long ululating laugh—the laugh of a complete and far-flung lunatic that sounded weirdly distant, as if the source were far from the phone, as if the caller had dialed the number, set the phone down, ran off down a long hallway and through a couple of closed-off rooms and laughed wildly. A click and a dial tone followed the laugh. The whole thing was a mystery to Edward, and, of course, was none of his business. But it was unsettling even so. In fact, he was suddenly struck with the certainty that it
was
his business, that the caller had expected him to answer the phone, would have understood the futility of calling to talk to Pince Nez.

“Wrong number,” said Edward, hanging up. Captain Pince Nez was asleep in his chair. Latzarel stood up, tiptoeing toward the door, carrying his precious book. Edward hesitated,
fairly certain that Pince Nez had never understood that he was selling the volume. He was half tempted to wake the old man up and explain it through the ear trumpet until he saw, supporting the bottom shelf of a ruined bookcase, a half dozen more worn copies of the book stacked atop one another. More lay in a heap in a cardboard box, shoved half in behind the same bookcase. The top copy was missing a cover and had obviously been used for years as a coaster. Edward looked at the three twenties lying atop the table in front of Pince Nez and shook his head. He didn’t regret the captain’s keeping them; he regretted only that they had been his twenties and not Latzarel’s. His friend gestured at him from the open front door, and Edward hurried down the steps after him, filling him in on the strange phone call.

“Tomfoolery,” said Latzarel, waving his book. “Kids.”

“It didn’t sound like kids.”

“Why would someone call up and laugh? It must be kids.”

“He
didn’t
laugh. The laughter came from the background somewhere. And it wasn’t that kind of laughter. …”

“Look at this!” Latzarel interrupted as the Hudson angled up Fourth Street toward downtown. “‘The ship docked in the Sea of the Arroyo Seco where two men came aboard, one with a steamer trunk, and one tall and thin and pale with terrible scars on his neck. In the trunk, I was told, was the body of a boy with the head of a fish.’”

“What?” said Edward, half shocked and half unbelieving. “What does
that
mean,
‘with
the head of a fish’? Was it a fish-headed boy or was there simply a fish head in with him? What is this anyway, a novel?”

“A ship’s log,” Latzarel said flatly. “Mostly charts and maps. There’s a navigable subterranean sea, according to this, that stretches from the Pacific to beyond the San Gabriel mountains. I’m not sure about the notations here, but it looks as if most of it is navigable only by submarine.”

Edward jerked around in his seat to stare at Latzarel who nodded slowly at him, puzzled. “And it’s not at all clear that the boy wore the head of the fish. Listen. ‘I ferried the doctor to Venice …”

“What doctor?” Edward asked.

“The man with the steamer trunk, apparently,” said Latzarel, starting over. “‘I ferried the doctor to Venice where, late in the evening of the 26th he delivered the chest to a
Chinese in exchange for three plugs of black opium knotted together with rawhide. The Chinese was referred to as Han Koi, and the doctor, who I knew as de Winter, was addressed as Dr. Frost by the Chinese, who was apparently in grave fear of him.’” Latzarel waved Edward to silence without looking up, and went on. “‘I myself shared his fear, having through the mate heard that the supposed corpse in the trunk had been the victim of one of de Winter’s experiments. A violent thrashing and gasping started within the trunk, which toppled over onto its side and broke open. Within, lying in a pool of green bile, was the live body of a youth with the head of a great fish, suffocating terribly, its eyes jerking to and fro in stark terror. Han Koi shouted and a dozen pig-tailed Chinese, half of them with knives drawn, swarmed out and dragged the trunk away into the depths of an abandoned cannery beneath the docks. I was given a two-inch knob of raw opium as payment and was glad to be quit of de Winter.’ That’s it,” said Latzarel.

“Just like that?” cried Edward. “Nothing more about the thing in the trunk?”

“Not a bit. This is a ship’s log, I’m telling you. That’s the last Pince Nez knew of it, apparently, unless there’s references to it later in the book.”

“There can’t be any doubt about the identity of this de Winter.”

“Not a bit.”

“No wonder William was in such a sweat to hide the message away.” The two rode along for a moment in silence, tooling up the on-ramp onto the Harbor Freeway. “It’s got to be lies,” mused Edward finally.

“It doesn’t look like lies to me,” answered Latzarel. “What conceivable reason would he have for fabrications? There isn’t enough here to develop a good fiction. Half of the volume is appended matter—charts and such. And you’re the one who said that de Winter’s identity is obvious.”

“Who was the fish-boy?” asked Edward abruptly.

“Some poor devil of a lost youth, I don’t wonder. Snatched possibly, like a stray dog.”

Edward nodded, but was unconvinced. “When did Reginald Peach disappear? He was younger than Basil, wasn’t he?”

“By ten years,” said Latzarel. “It was in the late thirties, I think. I remember it was then that Basil was institutionalized for the first time. We both know who his doctor was.”

“This thin man aboard the ferry,” Edward said, “what if that was Basil Peach?”

“Then we’re living in a strange world,” Latzarel said, closing the book and staring out of the window.

“Pince Nez assumed that de Winter was a vivisectionist. He had to. It was the only rational explanation. He wouldn’t have suspected that the thing in the trunk was a product of nature.”

“Maybe,” said Latzarel, “except that he was uncommonly familiar with the inhabitants of the subterranean sea. Lord knows what he understood about the products of nature.”

Edward agreed. And the more he thought about it, the more he agreed. He accelerated into the right lane and coasted down the off-ramp and onto Carson Street, turning right into the traffic of Figueroa and right again onto Sepulveda, pulling back onto the Harbor Freeway, westbound now, back the way they’d come. Latzarel knew immediately the reason for the change of direction. They hadn’t learned half enough from Captain Pince Nez. They couldn’t have. Neither one of them had known what to expect. They had been too easily tired by ear trumpets and senility.

It seemed to take hours to plod along down the Pacific Coast Highway from traffic light to weary traffic light. They rolled across Alameda and over the Dominguez Channel, then made the light at Santa Fe and angled over the Long Beach Freeway, dropping onto the bridge that spanned the Los Angeles River, the thin channel of dark water murky as tea and hinting at strange and unimagined sources. Iron doors led away into the concrete walls of the riverbank and, perhaps, into a dark chasm world lit by the glowing lights of gliding submarines and by the occasional lamps of the sewer dwellers, little stars that glinted on distant islands, goblin fires in the black void, miles below the concrete and asphalt lace of surface streets.

There was an ambulance and a police car in front of the building on Fourth and Ximeno. Edward drove past, turned up Ximeno, and parked on Broadway. Both men leaped out of the car, a thrill of fear catapulting them along the sidewalk. They forced themselves to slow when they reached the corner. It was Captain Pince Nez—dead—being loaded into the back of the ambulance which motored casually away past a half dozen lackluster onlookers. There was nothing particularly exciting in the death of a man ninety-two years old; at least there was nothing exciting in it for anyone but Edward and Professor
Latzarel—them and a fat, balding man with a stick and a cigar who turned out to be the landlord. He seemed half irritated that Pince Nez had chosen to die in his apartment building. “Crazy old fool,” the landlord said, whacking his stick against a little flagstone planter that sheltered a crop of weeds.

“Heart attack was it?” asked Edward, affecting a tourist’s concern.

“I suppose so,” said the fat mail, chewing his cigar. “Went straight to hell. You could see it in his face. What a look. I hope to never see what it was
he
saw. Devil finally came for him, I suppose. It was me who found him. Screamed he did—uncanny damn scream. I broke in, and there he was, face down on the floor. Had a dead fish in his hand. Can you beat that? Some sort of codfish. Was eating it, I guess. Him and his damned Oriental ways.”

Edward was trying to think of an excuse to look through the empty apartment. The dead fish business was troublesome. It would look suspicious, though, if he and Latzarel just nosed in. There was no telling what brought about the old man’s death, although Edward hadn’t any doubt that it wasn’t any simple heart attack. He’d seen something, like the landlord said. Only it wasn’t any spirit sent out from hell; it was a flesh and blood devil.

The landlord, about then, produced a wad of money from the pocket of his soiled khaki work pants. Edward guessed the denomination of the bills as well as the number—twenties, three of them. The landlord counted them with a satisfied look. Edward glanced at Latzarel who shook his head. “Water under the bridge,” he said. “Spilt milk.”

“We’re from the Fair Housing Council,” said Edward to the landlord. “This place is a menace—men dying of unknown causes. Dead fish everywhere. Look at this!” And he pointed toward a half-brown juniper in the flagstone planter, beneath which lay the stiff body of a rat, dead for weeks, a rare piece of serendipity. Edward strode down and flicked it out into the open with a stick. The rat was about a half inch thick—nothing but a leathery slab. Edward shook his head sadly. “We’ll see you Wednesday,” he said. “We’re giving you a chance.” With that he motioned to Latzarel and the two disappeared around the corner, leaving the stupefied landlord stammering on the sidewalk. They hurried to the car and drove away, Edward suddenly possessed by the possibility that they were being
watched—followed. That whoever had gotten Pince Nez would still be linking about. But the circuitous route they took through Long Beach revealed nothing suspicious, and they arrived home an hour later befuddled by the myriad loose ends of what might be coincidence and what might be portent. “Everything signifies,” William had said long weeks past.

Still there was no sign of Giles Peach. His mother received a postcard full of vague ambiguities, insisting that he was getting on well, hinting that he’d thought about traveling, perhaps to Windermere to see his father. The card was postmarked in Los Angeles. They could tell nothing from it.